Doi Saket – my kinda town! 😀 I love runs here! Alice prefers the area to the left of the canal – plenty of flat buffalo trails that weave around, so good for a runners trail. Moments before the run started there was no sign of Alice “Where the fuck is Alice?”. He showed up with moments to spare and set us off. I jogged along to the first circle with Obscene, who decided to take a lie down rather than bother doing any checking – the youngster preaches to us about short cutting, but doesn’t do a lot of checking, me wonders what parental guidance he’s getting!
Anyway, someone called it and the pack converged through an opening into another open buffalo field. Another check, and again I wanted to go right. I’m not sure why… The hare had given away that it was anticlockwise in his hare brief vernacular, but yet I didn’t want to turn left quite yet. I was wrong, as was most others, and we headed back out to the road through the opening that was so much less flooded than some months back!
We hit the canal, and for me here it had to be left, I didn’t see him crossing the canal, as there were just too many rice fields to play with. A circle check by the road had us checking a long time. There were many options and much confusion. The road, with it’s perpetual motorbikes, coupled with dogs meant nobody really had much of a clue what was going on. Finally someone called it on, straight on the other side of the canal. Obscene, kept going his side of the canal, and sure enough soon we were at another circle and again the ‘right’ side of the canal.
I think most of us missed a little loop here, as we headed into the Chinese cemetery. Tasty was way up ahead, and I joined Brownie jogging along behind. He wanted conversation, but I wanted my inhaler, which was sadly in the car. We hit the wimp rambo split, and of course turned right onto the rambo. Really not sure how much the walker trail took off- looks like a lot of haring effort for minimal hasher reward! Another circle, and Tasty went straight, Brownie went left, and I had to go right. No calls, nothing… When finally it was called straight, I was mumbling to myself about silent runners (but when I got home and checked the Strava, people weren’t checking where I thought they were!) No worries, I was coming back a bit from behind, and caught up again with the LAZY None of Your Business…
A couple of back to back false trails, and I was back in the mix – the mark of a good hare bringing the pack back together. At the canal road, I didn’t want to check the other side of the canal, so paused for Brownie to go straight and TMB to go back to the left. I chased after TMB at the call, and we rejoined the walkers. As a general rule I don’t like Walker/Runner trails – they have a habit of getting confused, particularly when walkers end up on trail ahead of runners. This time we rejoined at about the same time, but there was still some confusion. Again, good checks got the pack back together, and KO was out in front for a while, until she was thwarted by a neck high trip wire and a pack of deceptively friendly dogs.
We were on the home stretch, which sadly Alice hadn’t had time to mark. So I met him in the forest on his bike. He told me to follow the trail out “durrh”…. While behind me he followed laying paper. It entertained me no end for me to call “LOOKING”, while Alice was 2m behind on his bike, 2m behind him was 3.5 Inch, calling “ONON”, leaving those behind wondering wtf was happening as “LOOKING” “ONON” “LOOKING” “ONON” “LOOKING” “ONON”….